If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

History is littered with great firms that got killed by disruption. Of course, the personal computer, a technology that first took root as a toy, got Digital Equipment Corporation. Kodak missed the boat for a long time on digital imaging. Sony was slow to get MP3 technology. Microsoft doesn't know what to do with open source software. And so on.

If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

There's usually some process by which a potentially great idea gets prostituted into something lacklustre, or by which the wrong idea gets put forward.

When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character.

Capitalism has taught us that markets are always more efficient than hierarchical managerial coordination. But in a situation where those three conditions aren't met, I can't outsource or partner with you because markets don't function in the absence of sufficient information.